by Mark Pearson
‘How the hell does he even know who I am? What does he want from me?’
‘What am I suddenly, the oracle of fucking Delphi? Go and speak to him, Jack. Find out.’
*
It was Jennifer Hickling’s fifteenth birthday that morning, but if she was at all pleased or excited about it then it didn’t show in the brown eyes that looked back at her from the mirror. She was dressed in a quasi-goth style, with dyed black hair and black make-up around her eyes but not her lips. Her lips were ruby, thick with lipstick. She looked about twenty-two and felt half a century older. She put down a plastic hairbrush matted with different-coloured hair and practised a smile. Her face felt waxen somehow, its muscles not quite under her control, the corners of her mouth twitching downward. A reflex that she couldn’t control, like a knee being tapped with a hammer.
She smoothed down the front of her short dark denim skirt and held her Doc Marten-booted foot up, looking at it along the line of her dark stocking leg, and felt like kicking it straight into the man sleeping on the sofa. His mouth was open, drool gumming the corner of his mouth, and Jennifer felt like slamming the boot straight into his head. Breaking his teeth. Stamping on his face so it looked like raw hamburger. He was twenty-eight years old, with long greasy hair, two days’ worth of stubble on his pockmarked chin and stains on his jeans where he’d pissed himself during the night. The sight of him made her almost physically sick.
A wet sigh escaped from the lips of the sleeping man and Jennifer curled the corner of her own lip again. The guy was a pig. She picked up a short-bladed knife which she had put on top of the sideboard moments earlier and not for the first time thought about slicing him from ear to ear across his scrawny throat. Slaughtering him like the hog he was.
She looked back across at him, the knuckles on her hand whitening as she gripped the knife, and a younger girl’s voice cut across her dark imaginings.
‘Jennifer?’
Smoother than a seaside conjuror, she palmed the knife into the side pocket of her skirt and turned to smile at her nine-year-old sister Angela.
‘Wassup, kidder?’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Come on, then. Let’s get you breakfast.’
She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and steered her towards the kitchen.
‘Are you coming to school today?’
‘No. I’ll take you there, then I’ve got some things to take care of.’
‘You going up Camden again?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you do up there?’
Jennifer looked down at her sister without replying, her gaze hardening and then softening again in a blink. She ruffled her fingers through Angela’s curly hair and smiled.
‘You want toast or cereal?’
‘Toast.’
Jennifer led her through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Inside was a can of lager and half a pint of milk. She closed the door and smiled at her sister again. ‘How about an egg McMuffin? My birthday treat.’
*
Jennifer stood in the queue, looking at the menu to the side of the counter. Everything was so complicated – what about a simple list of burgers?
‘Help you?’
Jennifer looked at the bored eighteen-year-old who was addressing her. His face was slack, his eyes lifeless until she turned round and he saw her. Then they became mobile with interest. His dirty blond hair looked like it had been cut by his mother with a pair of garden shears and there was a faint whiff of body odour coming off him, almost but not quite disguised with cheap aftershave. He looked familiar somehow – Jennifer was sure she had seen him around the estate. Maybe she’d given him a hand job. He looked the type and the way he was shiftily looking at her, not meeting her gaze, made her suspect as much. Just another loser from the estate ending up in a dead-end job with no future, no life ahead of him. Shit, she thought, was this going to be her in three years’ time? Not if she could help it, she knew that much. But what options were there for her? If you were born on the Waterhill estate there weren’t a lot of prospects ahead. Drug dealing, petty crime, prostitution seemed to be the careers of choice for many. She’d had enough of two of them and had no intention of trying the other. She saw where it ended. Dead. One way or another.
‘Give me an egg McMuffin and a quarter-pounder with cheese and two large fries to go.’
‘You want to go for a meal deal and get a—’
Jennifer cut him off. ‘Just get me what I said!’
The youth nodded and scuttled away to fetch the food. Men, Jennifer thought. They were all arseholes. Every fucking one of them. She looked back at her sister, who was sitting quietly at a table. She remembered a time when Angela hadn’t been so quiet. She remembered her running around laughing, squealing, enjoying life. Before her mother met him and everything changed. She realised the burger boy was saying something to her and as she turned back he was holding out a bag of food for her. She reached into her pocket for the money but the boy leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially: ‘On the house. You know. Old time’s sake, Jennifer. Maybe see you around.’
He winked at her and the smell of his body odour once again assaulted her nostrils and for the second time that morning she felt like being physically sick,
Men. Every one of them pond scum. Jennifer slipped her hand into her pocket and closed her hand around the comforting handle of the knife. It had already killed one of them – maybe there was time for one more before she made her move. One more for luck.
*
Kate Walker stifled a yawn as she walked along the corridor, past the geriatric ward and up to the intensive-care unit. She nodded to Bob Wilkinson, who was standing outside one of the rooms looking in through the window. Kate joined him and watched as a doctor and a nurse inside checked the patient’s vitals, took the readings of the machines that were keeping him alive, made sure the drips were still connected properly and functioning.
‘No change, then?’ Kate asked.
‘No,’ said Bob Wilkinson. ‘Still touch and go.’
‘And the prognosis?’
Bob shrugged, a world-weary who-can-tell gesture that he had spent most of his life on the force perfecting. ‘Doctors. They ever tell you anything you want to know?’
Kate gave him the bent eyebrow.
‘Sorry, present company excepted …’ He paused for a moment. ‘Some of the time, anyway.’
‘Who caught the case?’
‘DI Bennett.’
Kate looked at him blankly.
‘DI Tony Bennett. I kid you not.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘A flashy-tied immigrant from up north somewhere.’
‘Immigrant?’
‘To London. Just transferred down.’
‘He around?’
Bob Wilkinson shook his head. ‘Been and gone. Early hours.’
Kate cast a critical gaze over him, seeing more than the usual world-weariness in his eyes. ‘You been here all night?’
‘Yeah. Three more stabbings came in after this one.’
‘You know what I think they should do?’
‘Go on.’
‘Ban knives.’
Bob laughed dryly. ‘Why not? Sure as shit worked for drugs.’
Kate turned and held her hand out to the intern who was coming out of the high-dependency room. He was in his twenties with a face still shy of the pessimism she imagined he would soon learn to develop. Hospitals boiled the optimism out of you as powerfully as they tried to wipe out germs. The nurse in her forties behind him looked as though she could eat him and three more like him for breakfast.
‘Doctor Kate Walker. I’m a police surgeon.’
The doctor shook her hand with a surprisingly powerful grip, glancing back at his comatose patient. ‘I’m Doctor Hake.’ He smiled slightly self-consciously. ‘Timothy. You were the first person attending at the scene?’
‘I was. The sergeant and I were on our way back from a domestic call and fo
und him unconscious off the road. If a slightly drunk young lady hadn’t tried to take a pee in the alleyway there we might never have found him.’
The young doctor nodded. ‘You probably saved his life.’
‘He’s going to come through?’
Doctor Hake gave his shoulders the slightest of lifts. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I said “probably”. You don’t know how long he was out there before you found him?’
‘No idea.’
‘He lost a lot of blood and there were hypothermia complications because of it. We’re trying to stabilise him, but there are internal bleeding issues – together with the wound, the shock, the possibility of serious infection.’
‘I know the score, doctor. I was a forensic pathologist for quite a number of years.’
Hake looked at her, puzzled. ‘You were? And now you’re a police surgeon?’
‘Not just that. I work here on the teaching staff and in the students’ clinic.’ Kate smiled. ‘I’m a multitasker. The police-surgeon work is just the odd shift here and there.’
‘Voluntary.’
‘More or less.’
‘So isn’t that …’ He hesitated. Trying to find the right words.
‘A backward step?’
‘Well, yeah. I’m looking to make consultant by the time I’m your age.’
Kate laughed. ‘Good luck. And yeah, in career terms maybe it is a backward step. But I prefer working with people when they still have a chance to make it, if you know what I mean,’
Timothy Hake smiled back. ‘Yeah, I can see how that works.’
‘So. If you had to make a call …’ She nodded towards the patient in the room. ‘He going to make it?’
‘I could give you all the statistics, my medical background, my professional analysis …’
‘But?’
‘You might as well flip a coin.’
He nodded apologetically and moved off, the nurse ahead of him like a linebacker running defence.
Bob Wilkinson ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Fifty-fifty. I’d take those odds on the dog track sometimes.’
‘You would on a red-hot favourite. But you wouldn’t bet your mortgage on it. Or your life.’
‘True.’
‘We know who he is yet?’
‘Nope. No ID on him. No one’s come forward to report him missing.’
‘And what’s the new DI doing about it?’
‘He’s got uniform canvassing the vicinity but this is Camden Town we’re talking about. North London. Monkeyland.’
Kate shot him a quizzical look and Bob Wilkinson put his hands over his ears, eyes and mouth in succession. ‘Only not so wise,’ he said.
Kate looked back at the patient. The steady beat of the heart monitor like a grandfather clock counting down.
‘Did you read the story last year about the chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden?’
‘No. What about it?’
‘Called Santino. He started throwing pebbles and bits of concrete he’d shaped up like discs at visitors.’
‘So?’
‘So there were no stones in his compound. The keepers couldn’t work out where he was getting them from.’
‘And where was he getting them from?’
‘From the moat that surrounded his compound. He had a stockpile of rocks at the ready.’
‘I’m sure you’re going somewhere with this.’
‘He had them ready to throw at human visitors.’ Kate nodded through the window at the stabbed man. ‘It seems that premeditation is not now a solely human trait.’
‘So what’s your point?’
‘Maybe Planet of the Apes got it right. Maybe our time on this planet is coming to an end. Maybe it deserves to.’
‘You know what I think?’
‘Enlighten me, Bob.’
‘I think you spend too much time with miserable bleeding Irishmen.’
Kate laughed. The warmth of the sound should have been a tonic to the unconscious man in the intensive-care bed but he was now in a place beyond human emotion and a long way from home.
*
Jennifer held her hand out at the bus stop. Technically, she didn’t need to. Technically, buses were supposed to stop automatically. Technically, we were still in an ice age, according to her English teacher, who thought he knew everything. It was bleeding cold, she knew that sure enough. Last year there might have been an Indian summer, this year England seemed to have skipped autumn altogether and headed straight into winter. So technically it was still autumn, technically the bus should halt at a designated stop but if Jennifer Hickling had learned anything in her fifteen long years on this Earth it was that ‘technically’ didn’t mean shit, not in this city.
The single-decker hopper bus pulled up and the doors swung open with a mechanical clang and a hiss of compressed air. Jennifer flashed her bus pass at the twenty-something-year-old African-English driver, who smiled at her with perfect teeth and genuine good humour.
‘Nice day for the ducks,’ he said.
But Jennifer ignored him and headed down the bus as it pulled away from the kerb and into traffic. What the fuck has he got to be so pleased about? she thought to herself. The bus was nearly full but halfway down on the right a seventeen-year-old youth wearing baggy jeans, a hoodie and a fatuous smile plastered across his pale white face winked at her, spreading his legs wider, and patted the vacant seat next to him. She flipped him the finger and walked to the back where an elderly woman was sitting tight against the window staring out at the rain. She had a loose canvas shoulder bag in her lap, was wearing a smart raincoat and had her hair covered in a floral scarf.
Jennifer sat down next to her and the woman looked across at her for a moment, blinking as if to pull her eyes into focus. Then she smiled at her.
‘You going to be late at school?’
Jennifer shrugged dismissively. ‘It’s a field-studies day.’
‘Oh, I see.’ The woman nodded and looked at her again.
‘Vampires is it, dear?’ she asked.
Now Jennifer blinked herself. ‘You what?’
‘What with the hair and the make-up. What do you call yourselves? Geemos. I know you’re all into it now. I have a granddaughter your age Kirsty.’
Jennifer didn’t have a clue what the daft old bat was going on about. ‘Whatever.’
‘Stephanie Meyer, isn’t it? She’s all the rage. I have to get one of hers for Kirsty for Christmas. Maybe you can tell me what the latest one is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘In my day it was Errol Flynn.’
Jennifer sighed, exasperated, and turned to her. ‘What?’
‘That had all the girls swooning. Mind you, he just wore green tights and the like. Maybe he should have dressed in black and gone out at night.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded him biting my neck. That’s for sure.’
Jennifer’s lips curled. ‘Yeah, too much information.’
‘I wasn’t always old, you know,’ said the woman, smiling, lost a little in her nostalgic reveries. ‘Like they say, tempus fugit.’
Jennifer would have responded, pretty sure that she had just been dissed by the old woman, but she stood up before Jennifer could say anything.
‘Anyway, this is my stop.’
As Jennifer shifted her legs sideways to let the woman pass, the bus swerved to the side and came to a sudden stop, throwing the old woman against her and causing her to drop her bag. Jennifer muttered under her breath and bent down to pick it up, sweeping the contents back into it. She stood up, handed it to the old woman and let her pass.
‘Thanks, dear, and good luck with the undead.’
Jennifer watched her go and waited for the doors to close and the bus to pull out into the traffic again. Then she opened her left hand and looked at the small purse that she had neglected to return to the old woman’s bag.
Maybe the woman’s granddaughter would have to wait for her bloody vampire novel or
whatever it was that the daft old bat had been wittering on about. Some people liked to read horror stories, Jennifer reckoned, some people were already living in them. She opened her own bag, put the purse in and checked the contents: her own purse, five packets of condoms, a pepper spray she had bought off one of the other girls, some amyl-nitrate poppers. She closed the bag and stood up as the bus came into Camden.
Yeah. Time for field studies.
*
The governor of Bayfield prison, Ron Cornwell, a tall, thin man in his fifties, always felt nervous in Delaney’s presence and couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason. Some of the most dangerous criminals in the country were incarcerated in his prison and yet he felt more uncomfortable under the Irishman’s probing gaze than he did among them. It was to do with power, he guessed – he had complete control over the men in his care. He wasn’t sure whether anybody had control over this particular man and from what he had heard of him he couldn’t believe, even if only half the tales were true, why Delaney hadn’t been kicked off the force long before. He did get results, though, that much Cornwell knew. There were a lot of his inmates right now who would have dearly loved to get their hands on Jack Delaney.
They were in the segregated wing of Bayfield prison. An inner sanctum reserved for those prisoners most at risk from their fellow detainees. Maybe some of them would have been better off in the secure facilities at Broadmoor but what distinguished the criminally insane from the criminally and murderously perverse was a fine distinction that didn’t trouble Ron Cornwell’s conscience. And if the perverts were targeted and hurt or even murdered because of it – if there was no honour among thieves, then what should pass for honour among these lowest of the low? – then he didn’t have a problem with that, either. The segregated wing was a sanctum from the normal prison population but when rabid dogs turned on each other a handler was well advised to stay clear. After all, these were the prisoners that even the most morally reprehensible of the prison’s general population found repugnant. Child killers. Child molesters, rapists, torturers. And the worst of the lot, as far as some of the inmates were concerned, were ex-policemen.
People like Charles Walker. Delaney’s old boss and Kate’s uncle, who was awaiting trial on various counts of murder and the sexual exploitation of children.